Roberts was born in
Bath, the son of a department store worker and educated at
Taunton School. He won a scholarship to
Keble College, Oxford, and took a first in
Modern History in 1948. After
National Service, he was elected a prize fellow of
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he completed a doctoral thesis on
the Italian republic set up during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1953 Roberts was elected a fellow and tutor in Modern History at
Merton College, Oxford, and in the same year, he went as a
Commonwealth Fund fellow to
Princeton and
Yale, where his interests broadened beyond European history. He returned to America three times as a visiting professor in the 1960s. In 1964 Roberts lectured for the British Council in India, and from 1966 to 1977 Roberts served as joint editor of the
English Historical Review.
The Times Literary Supplement described Roberts as "master of the broad brush-stroke", and in 1985 Roberts wrote and presented the thirteen-part BBC television series
The Triumph of the West, a series about the evolution, shaping, and global impacts of Western Civilization, in which painted a broad canvas but avoided simplistic solutions, encouraging the audience to think and reach its own conclusions. Roberts died in 2003, at
Roadwater,
Somerset, shortly after completing the fourth revised edition of
The New History of the World. ==Legacy==